At 7 am in Inderlok, a locality in northwest Delhi, a truck backs slowly into a warehouse lane. One by one, 50 kg blocks of ice are wrestled off the flatbed with a tool called a pakad, a spiked iron tong, and slid across a wooden floor laid specifically to slow the melt. They will be gone — distributed across Delhi’s NCR in smaller consignments, keeping the city’s summer economy from sweating to a halt.
This is the quiet machinery behind every chilled glass of sugarcane juice, every kulfi stick sold at a traffic light, every gin and tonic poured in a South Delhi bar. The ice trade is ancient, unglamorous, and, in a city where May temperatures now crack 45°C, completely indispensable.
Abdullah Chaudhary, who runs the distribution arm of Chaudhary Ice Factory out of Shakarpur, inherited the business from his father. The factory sits in Wave City, Ghaziabad, where filtered RO water is poured into steel moulds and left to freeze for thirty-two hours using a refrigeration system that runs on ammonia gas. “It takes 20 to 22 hours more after that for the block to fully set,” he explains. The finished slab — 50 to 60 kg of opaque, industrial ice — is then loaded onto insulated trucks, carpeted wooden floors absorbing the shock and the slow drip of surface melt on the road back into the city.
The customers are not households. They are vendors, market traders and construction sites. In peak summer, a block sells for ₹550 to ₹600, working out to roughly ₹6 to ₹6.50 per kilogram. In winter, when demand craters, the price drops to ₹400–450. On a good summer day, the Shakarpur distribution point moves 12 to 14 blocks, roughly 700 to 800 kilograms of ice.
A difficult summer
This summer, though, has been uneven. “Weather conditions, rainy season — it has not been so good,” Chaudhary says, with a practised shrug. In a strong summer, demand can spike two hundred to three hundred percent over winter baseline. This year, the clouds have not cooperated.
Melting of ice is another unavoidable problem.” Atleast 15-20 percent of each block of ice melts during transportation, this is a trade-off,” Chaudhary says.
“I’ve been working here for the past ten years, hauling ice every single day,” says Rakesh Kumar, 32, a loader at the warehouse. “I earn ₹41,000 a month doing this. I joined this business because I had no other options back then. It’s daily work - lifting, loading, dragging fifty-kilo blocks from the truck, from morning till the work is done. You don’t really think much, you just keep moving,” he says.
Downstream, at Connaught Place, Bhupinder Jadhav has been selling ice cream from the same spot for years. He buys around 80 kg of ice every day, breaks the blocks down himself, and packs them around his freezer to hold temperature through the long afternoon. “I pay R 30 per kilogram,” he says. “In summer, my demand goes up eighty to hundred percent. Without ice, there is nothing to sell.” It is a thin margin business built entirely on the reliability of a supply chain most of his customers never think about.
The right ice
At a Social’s in Hauz Khas, the bar manager, Rohan Pandey, is more particular about his ice than most people are about their spirits. “We source separately — tube ice, crystal-clear, no cloudiness,” he says. “Industrial block ice is fine for cooling a bucket, but for a cocktail that is going to sit in front of a guest for twenty minutes, it has to be slow-melting and clean. Dilution is everything.”
His bar goes through close to 40 kg on a busy Friday, sourced from a specialist supplier in Okhla who produces food-grade product using double-filtered water and slow-freeze technology. The price, he notes wryly, is three times what Chaudhary’s ice would cost. “People don’t pay for the ice,” he says. “They pay for what it doesn’t do to the drink.”
Back in Inderlok, the last of the morning’s consignment is being weighed and loaded onto smaller carriers. The hazards of the trade are straightforward and serious: slip-and-fall injuries on wet, icy floors; the sheer physical demand of moving sixty-kilogram blocks each morning; a chronic shortage of skilled labourers who know how to use the pakad without putting themselves on the ground.
“They leave after two, three days,” Chaudhary says of new hires. “It needs strength, and it needs skill. Not everyone can hold this.” He mimes the grip - two hands, angled low, knees bent - the posture of a man who learned the trade before he learned to drive.
By 9 am, the warehouse is empty and the city is waking up. The kulfi man is at his corner. The juice bar shutter is rolling up. Somewhere in a Connaught Place bylane, Jadhav is arranging his cart. None of it would be cold without the men who moved ice before any of them arrived. That is the supply chain Delhi runs on: invisible, exhausting, and quietly essential.
(Written by S. Keerthivas)
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